Surprises

Jumieges Abbey
Jumieges Abb

Sometimes, like the day we went to Mont-Saint-Michel, you don’t expect anything and are rewarded with beauty, magic and meaning.  And sometimes you don’t get what you wanted but it’s really OK.

We meant to visit abbeys and chateaus but our guide was an Abbeys only sort of guy so we ended up at Jumieges Abbey about an hour and a half from Rouen.  We found soaring beauty, like this archway. . .

And this Madonna , contemporary yet right where it should have been, in the Abbey Cloister, in the center, at the Abbey de Boscherville down the road, where she oversees a kingdom of her own.

saller
Abbey de Boscherville – Madonna

We learned a great deal about Benedictine Monks, monasteries, the politics of moving from the election of the abbot (chief of the Abbey) to empowering the local Duke to appoint him, (you can imagine where that led.)

And then there was the French Revolution.  To us, that means guillotines and The Terrors.  In fact, there was a clear political philosophy and plan that informed the cause before it got away from the thinkers.

Some of France’s basic principles of governance were, in fact, established by the revolutionaries, who fanned out into the countryside to create more than 90 “departments” through which to govern.  Each was required to be no larger in circumference than the distance a horse could travel in one day.  This kept the people close to, and invested in, their government.  It also  provided the government with ample intelligence on neighborhood issues and plans.

The churches also faced challenges.   Each town had to choose:  They were permitted only ONE church since there was only ONE city hall.  It was unacceptable for the Church to overshadow the state by setting up small parallel governments in or sphere of influence. 

And then we went to Honfleur, one of only a few towns in France that suffered no bomb damage during WWII.  It’s had damage of a different kind, though — so many tourists — like Provincetown in August.  We were ready to be snooty about the entire experience and then we came upon her:

Ste Teresa stone church honfleur
Sainte Thérèsa de Lisieux in the Wood Church of Honfleur

She is Sainte Thérèsa de Lisieux, a 20th Century girl who died of tuberculosis.  Her sister wrote a book about her and her good deeds and she was canonized during the papacy of John Paul II.   This shrine is in the Wood Church of Ste. Catherine in the middle of Honfleur and the church, and the haunting  Thérèsa were worth the trip.

Saint Joan was there too, so I’ve put her photo below.  Tomorrow Antwerp.

 

 

 

Saint Joan of Arc in the Wood Church of St. Catherine
Saint Joan of Arc in the Wood Church of St. Catherine

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.

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